PPF Blog

New York elected official pages on AskThem, with eight verified responders

Here in NYC, we’re very excited to have eight elected officials signed-up as verified responders on AskThem, with more in the works to announce soon.

Handy links to pages for NY elected officials, ahead of the national CodeAcross hackathon today, including in NYC by BetaNYC, where Maryam & I from AskThem will be attending – along with two of AskThem’s verified responders, Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer & Council Member Ben Kallos.

As of this launch version, AskThem.io offers profile pages for every federal & state elected official nationwide, as well as all 50 U.S. state governors, and mayors & city council members in the top 60 U.S. cities by population. Thanks to our data sources, Google Civic Information API and DemocracyMap for providing this foundation. Dive in from our homepage by entering a zip code, or clicking the button to “ask your own question”, or from our national map.

(With lots, lots more coming soon – including nearly every U.S. mayor & tens of thousands more county-level officials and municipal elected officials in more states.)

AskThem is the first open-source website to allow visitors to find all their elected officials, down to the municipal level, simply by entering a residential street address. We can connect you with everyone who represents you, all in one place, for continual engagement with government in an open public forum. Open-source and open-data for the public benefit. Previous blog post tonight on how to get your city government’s data in the community Open Civic Data description, to display on AskThem and across the open web. Good #CodeAcross project!

Here in NYC, we’re very excited to have eight elected officials signed-up as verified responders on AskThem, with more in the works to announce soon. Please ask all your representatives to sign up, AskThem is free for everyone & non-profit – elected officials should just create an account and email david@ppolitics.org to let me know, and we’ll verify them in our system, piece of cake. The eight electeds highlighted below are leaders in responsive, accountable government, and we’re working to spread the cultural change that they’re helping push forward.

Question and petition every NYC Council member and every NY elected official

… full list of over 66 elected officials nationwide who are currently publicly committed to responding to a popular question per month from the public (or their constituents) on AskThem, for greater online dialogue with government & public accountability.

Over 100 more verified Twitter accounts with profile pages already on AskThem, though you can ask a question to any verified Twitter account through our homepage by clicking “ask your own question” and then selecting the button to locate by Twitter name.

More info on our open AskThem GitHub repo, and feel free to come hang out during this weekend’s hackathon in #opengovernment on Freenode in IRC (I’m davidrussellmoor), or ping me individually, davidrussellmoore on Gchat, davidmooreppf on Skype.

Sample page of city government overviews: Knight Foundation communities, Philadelphia and San Jose; custom scraped data for Chicago & Austin. Any city can have a page that looks like that on AskThem, with your help (or with charitable funding support for our non-profit, open-source platform).

Previous blog post on how to get your city government’s data in the community Open Civic Data description, to display on AskThem and across the open web. Good CodeAcross hackathon project! Go #opengov NYC, Go BetaNYC, hope you ask some good questions on AskThem to your municipal elected officials. Just send me an email (david@ppolitics.org) w/ a link to your question and we’ll highlight it on our PPF Blog, Facebook page & @AskThemPPF Twttr acc’t.